New Apps Let You Manage the Cloud from Anywhere

A pair of new apps coming soon dovetail nicely with Voxilla tech-honcho Eric Chamberlain’s two-part series on working with Amazon’s web services (AWS).

In keeping with a recent study from Gartner indicating that deskphones could soon disappear from the enterprise, Ylastic has released mobile versions of its AWS management tool for Android and iPhone. For $10 per month, users can manage EC2 instances, Simple Storage Service (S3) buckets and SimpleDB domains, among other capabilities. The mobile app leaves out some features found in Ylastic’s Web-based application, such as daily S3 stats and user management.

Follow after the jump for another option to work in the cloud away from the desktop.

Rochester-based DirectThought has a mobile EC2 management tool in development that senior architect David Kavanagh hopes will be available for iPhone on Apple’s AppStore in about a month.

While it’s not uncommon for IT staff who are responsible for a Web application to have some monitoring and alerts pushed to their mobile device, enabling them to go ahead and make system changes as well is “pretty powerful,” Kavanagh says, confirming DirectThought’s belief in the market for mobile cloud management services.

directE2 is being built using ctypica, an Objective-C version of typica, an open-source Java client library for tapping into various Amazon Web Services. Kavanagh, who started the typica project, said ctypica will also be open-sourced under the Apache 2.0 license, enabling other iPhone applications to connect with AWS.

DirectThought is only developing for iPhone at this time because, Kavanaugh says, he’s “not too hot on Windows mobile” and there are not yet enough Android phones on the market. He indicated directE2 for iPhone will have a free version that allows EC2 monitoring; pricing has not been determined for the full-fledged edition.